FSFE Newsletter - November 2013

The good experimentation platforms

At the first glance some devices might look like crap. Why should anyone buy
them? Some people laughed at your editor when he bought his Open Moko Neo
Freerunner. You could buy cheaper devices with a faster CPU, more RAM, more
disk space, nicer casing, better network connection, better microphone and
speakers at that time.

But devices like the OpenMoko are important for each one of us even if we
are not buying them ourselves. They are crucial because they are hardware
experimentation platforms which help programmers to learn how exactly
computers work -- what the code is really doing -- and therefore enables them to
write better software for all of us.

Paul Boddie wrote about one
of those devices: the Ben NanoNote. This device is completely supported
by Free Software drivers within the upstream Linux kernel distribution. It does
not rely on any proprietary software, including firmware blobs, for
installation or running the device. The "Ben" encourages experimentation: you
can re-flash the bootloader and the operating system with own images, and you
can install programs of your choice.

The bad restrictions

The knowledge we, as a community, gain from those devices helps us to
counterbalance IT manufacturers who use many different restrictions with
different technology to take away control from us. On several
devices the manufacturers decide which software we can install or remove from
our computers, they do not want us to learn how the software works, and they do
not want us to change the software. They decide how we can watch DVDs, which
SIM cards providers we can use in our computers, and they want to be able to
remotely delete our data including books, music, or movies.

The questions is: do we let them do this? Do we accept those restrictions?
And if we do not, what else do we need to counterbalance those
developments?

Beside the coordinators meeting, FSFE held its annual general assembly in
Vienna. Jonas Öberg reflected how
we worked on our mission impact and Hugo Roy wrote
about the second day with the formalities, including reelection of Karsten
Gerloff as President and Reinhard Müller as Financial Officer. After 2 good
years Henrik Sandklef stepped down as Vice President, and your editor was
elected to take over that position.

And if you have not yet read Ron Amadeo's article "Google's
iron grip on Android", you should do so and discuss it on our mailing list.
The article explains current developments in Android such as possible new
dependencies on non-free software.

Get active: They don't want you to - but what do you want?

As explained above we do not want people to accept all the restrictions on
our devices. To gain more transparency we want an easy way to inform a wider
audience about those restrictions, and especially give younger people a way to
show that they do not agree with it. On the 4th of November we go live with TheyDontWantYou.To and together with our
partner organisations we start distributing short microblog messages,
highlighting different restrictions using the #theydontwantyouto hashtag.

Help us to distribute the messages, send the messages to your friends, write
about them in your blog, use our stickers
to raise awareness, and to let us know about restrictions you encounter in
your daily life.